Error Theory

Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

OK, me too, Alec. I “checked the facts.” You’re entirely right. March 31–comment by Anonymous. July 21–comment from Anonymous is gone. Well played, old man.

Now will you tell us what you think this means?

Really? A TBogger had checked a fact? Alas, that would be the end of any interest in the facts, as "quakerinabasement" himself quickly became the snittiest of the snarkers.

As I told them, the ARE my fellow countrymen. They deserve to know about the terrorist memorial being built in Shanksville, so I had to try.

What the deletion of Jaques comment means

First of all, quaker in a basement, it means that TBogg lied to you and all the other Bogglings.

But it also matters because the Park Service has only released excerpts of the Jaques document. The comment that Jaques posted on TBogg's site was his full assessment of warnings about Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial, at a time when Jaques was the only outside person who the Memorial Project was consulting.

The full assessment shows the blatant dishonesty of Jaques excuses for the giant Mecca oriented mihrab. (It's too big to be seen as the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, says Jaques, despite the similarity. A half mile wide? That would make it the world's largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. Don't worry!)

Of course I made a copy of the Jaques full assessment when I found it posted on TBogg's site, but with the Jaques comment deleted, I couldn't prove that my copy was accurate.

Well, that's how it WOULD have been, if not for the Wayback Machine, which captured both the Jaques comment and TBogg's deletion of it.

Checking TBogg on WaybackIt only takes a couple of minutes to verify that TBogg deleted Jaques' comment. Just check the Wayback Machine's snapshots of TBogg's website

On March 31st 2006 the Jaques comment appears for the first time. (It's at the end of the January 6, 2006 Lunacy Abounds post, about a third from the bottom on TBogg's January archive page. Click the Lunacy Abounds permalink to see the comment thread.)

On July 21st the Jaques comment disappears from the end of the comment thread.

On August 21st the entire Lunacy Abounds comment thread is hidden, while all of the other comment threads on the January 2006 archive page remain visible.

On August 28th the Lunacy Abounds comment thread is turned back on, again without the Jaques comment.

TBogg said that Haloscan wiped out all of his comment threads. That might have happened later, but it isn't what happened over the summer of 2006, when the Jaques comment was hand deleted and the Lunacy Abounds comment thread was toggled off and on.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

TBogg's phony excuse for the deleted Flight 93 document

TBogg has posted an explanation for how Kevin Jaques’ assessment of the Flight 93 Memorial went missing from one of his comment threads. Sometime following “the Infamous Alec Rawls Comment Thread,” says TBogg:

... after I was done picking up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and the assorted discarded underwear, I switched from Blogspot comments to Haloscan. In the process, all of the previous comment threads were lost...

Fortunately through the miracle of intertubes nerdiness the Lost Commentinent has been rediscovered and you can go read them here.

TBogg insinuates that the Holoscan snafu is the reason that the restored comment thread is missing the Jaques comment, but he does not actually say it, and for good reason. The Jaques deletion had nothing to do with any comment system switchover.

A commentator on this blog looked up TBogg’s site on the Wayback Machine. Turns out that Wayback was taking snapshots of Tbogg’s comment threads every week. Only Blogspot comments show up on Wayback, but that is all that is needed to tell the tale.

Throughout the period in question (spring and summer of 2006) all of TBogg’s Blogspot comment threads are stable except for the “infamous” one, which actually exhibits quite a bit of activity. Not only did TBogg hand delete Jaques comment, but he was apparently torn about it, changing his mind a number of times over a period of weeks.

Background, for those who don't know what Kevin Jaques did

It is not known exactly when Kevin Jaques was asked by the Memorial Project to write an assessment of my warnings about Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Crescent of Embrace design. Most likely he wrote it in late March of 2006, just before he posted it at the end of TBogg’s January 6, 2006 comment thread.

(If anyone wants to look, go open up the March 31st snapshot of TBogg’s site, then find the January 06 archive page. The Lunacy Abounds post is about a third of the way up from the bottom. Click on the permalink and the comment thread will appear, with the Jaques comment at the bottom. In the previous snapshot, March 28th, the Jaques comment has not yet shown up. Ditto for earlier dates.)

The Jaques comment is important because it shows the blatant dishonesty of the Park Service’s internal investigation. Jaques acknowledged that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the center of the design is similar to the Mecca direction indicator (called a mihrab) around which every mosque is built, then he told the Park Service not to worry because no one has ever seen seen a mihrab anywhere near this big before:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

The Park Service has released excerpts from Jaques’ comment, proving that the TBogg comment comes from Jaques, but it has never released the revealing parts, like where Jaques says not to worry because one has ever seen a mihrab this big before.

How to get rid of the body? TBogg has second, third and fourth thoughts

TBogg is THE source for the full text of Jaques' analysis, with its blatant excuse-making for the giant mihrab. Having this analysis publicly available was a problem, both for Jaques and for the Park Service. Since TBogg had no way of knowing that on his own, it seems that somebody must have contacted him, because in the July 21, 2006 snapshot of Tbogg’s Lunacy Abounds comment thread, the Jaques comment is missing from the end.

Blogger allows blog administrators to hide and show comment threads, and it allows them to delete individual comments. Blogger also allows people who comment non-anonymously to delete their own comments. Jaques left his comment anonymously, so only a blog administrator could have deleted his comment. Unless TBogg got hacked, that would have been TBogg.

The August 21st snapshot of the Lunacy Abounds post shows shows TBogg having another thought. Here the entire Lunacy Abounds comment thread is hidden, while all the other comment threads on the archive page remain visible. (About half the posts in Wayback's August 21st snapshot of TBogg's January 2006 archive page do not have working permalinks, but of the pages that do come up individually, only Lunacy Abounds has the comment thread hidden.)

If “all of the previous comment threads were lost,” that was a separate incident. The archival record shows that a blog administrator went separately to the Lunacy Abounds post and turned off the comment thread, leaving all the other comment threads untouched. Again, unless TBogg got hacked (or the Wayback Machine is wacked), that was TBogg.

Of course TBogg did not say anything about getting hacked. He insinuated that Haloscan is the culprit. Nope. Haloscan is innocent. Does TBogg want to try pointing the finger anywhere else?

On August 28, 2006, the “infamous comment thread” reappears, again without the Jaques comment. Wayback doesn’t have TBogg snapshots for 2007, but for most of this year the comment thread was again turned off (the Haloscan snafu?), until sometime recently TBogg himself retrieved the comment thread (without the Jaques comment) from the wayback machine and linked it to his original Lunacy Abounds post.

Not quite Hamlet. TBogg consistently wants the Jaques comment “not to be.” He just can’t decide how he wants it not to be.

TBogg’s Monica Lewinsky moment

To complete his Clintonian deception, TBogg makes an over the top admission, pretending it is all a joke:

So, yes. I have been busted. I've been getting more payoffs than Bill Bennett with a roll of nickels at Circus Circus. Between George Soros and Osama bin Laden I've received so many Miatas, that some of them are still sitting around in the blister packs.

At least he makes it amusing, but the joke is on the Bogglings. TBogg actually means the "I have been busted" part.

Will TBogg’s legions of vitriolic followers take this Clintonian lie kneeling down? What's it going to be TBoggers: spit or swallow?

TBogg will have to suffer some embarrassment for duping his readers, but so what? The man embarrasses himself every day. The important thing is that he is in a position to actually be of help in exposing the cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the Flight 93 memorial.

Who contacted him? What did they say? Did he knuckle to a plea from Jaques alone, or was he actually contacted by the government?

TBogg could well have been duped himself. Maybe someone at the Park Service told him that this was an internal government document that was not supposed to be available to the public and asked if he could please remove it. Now that he knows a) that the Park Service is accused of perpetrating a cover up, and b) how the document that he himself covered up contains clear examples of dishonest excuse making, that puts TBogg in the same position as his army of Bogglings. He knows that he has been used.

Is he going to swallow it, or spit it out? Spit TBogg. You’ll feel much better about yourself in the morning.

Can’t we all just be against planting a terrorist memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site?

There is no reason for a left-right divide over the Flight 93 Memorial. It isn’t the critics of the crescent design that politicized the issue, but the defenders of the crescent, starting with newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that knew about the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent back in 2005 and decided not to publish it. They were too busy using their editorial page to slam critics of the crescent as right wing bigots. Inconvenient facts could not be allowed to interfere with their chosen story line.

Then there are people like TBogg who politicize everything. Instead of checking the facts, he starts with his presumptions about which side he should be on, then looks for smarmy ways to characterize the opposition. That is not a rational thought process, but he can more than redeem himself if he will just stop deceiving everybody and start helping to expose the facts.

He could also give his moron brigades a chance to redeem themselves by asking them to actually check a couple factual claims about the crescent design:

Is it true that every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign?

This is what the blogosphere OUGHT to be good for. If TBogg is too busy to check the facts, why not put his minions to work?

For more on who TBogg has been covering up for, see last week’s post on Dr. Jaques 2001 article, where he argued that we should formulate our response to the 9/11 attacks in accordance with sharia law. How did this advocate for Islamic supremacism become the Memorial Project’s sole consultant on the warnings of Islamic symbolism in the crescent design during a crucial period when the Project’s dismissive posture was set in stone?

If TBogg would tell us what he knows, it might help answer that question, or pose others equally important. No more deception. Just tell the damned truth.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

Want to join our blogbursts and be on the blogburst blogroll? Email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog's url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Rumsfeld's victory: a retrospective look at our de facto flytrap strategy in Iraq

Why did the Iraqis turn against al Qaeda and Iran? Because al Qaeda and Iran were murdering them en masse. And why were al Qaeda and Iran murdering Iraqis en masse? Because Defense Secretary Rumfeld’s small-footprint force-protection strategy meant that they couldn’t attack American troops without getting immediately annihilated.

In order to get the “continuing violence” that their allies in the Western media could use to create American defeat on the home front, the Saudi and Iranian proxy warriors in Iraq had no choice but to wage war on the Iraqi people.

They understood the risks: that playing for a media victory would cost them the war on the ground. This is clear in the letter that al Qaeda #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Fall of 2005:

The policy followed by the brothers in Baghdad is a media oriented policy without a clear comprehensive plan to capture an area or an enemy center. Other word, the significance of the strategy of their work is to show in the media that the American and the government do not control the situation and there is resistance against them. This policy dragged us to the type of operations that are attracted to the media, and we go to the streets from time to time for more possible noisy operations which follow the same direction.

This direction has large positive effects; however, being preoccupied with it alone delays more important operations such as taking control of some areas, … That is why every year is worse than the previous year as far as the Mujahidin’s control and influence over Baghdad. [From the CENTCOM translation of Zawahiri's letter, May 2006, not identified as coming from Zawahiri, but containing much language in common with the captured Zawahiri letter that was released to the public in October 2005]

Sunni Al Qaeda’s attacks on civilians were initially aimed at their religious rivals, the Shiites. Zawahiri recognized that this was turning the Iraqi population against al Qaeda, and urged Zarqawi to stop:

… why were there attacks on ordinary Shia? Won't this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth? [Section 4E, Weekly standard translation.]

As someone watching from afar, Zawahiri found the grisly videotaped beheadings of hostages particularly grating:

Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable - also- are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages. [Section 5]

All of this terrorizing of the Iraqi population should only be used as a last resort, Zawahir urged:

Therefore the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve, if there is no contravention of Sharia in such avoidance, and as long as there are other options to resort to, meaning we must not throw the masses-scant in knowledge-into the sea before we teach them to swim… [section A4.]

There were no other options to resort to

The problem for al Qaeda was that they had no viable options. Allying with the Western media was it. Military victory on the ground was simply impossible:

… however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging war on us. [Section 5]

On the other hand, the media strategy still offered a real chance for victory, given that the West’s anti-war media had succeeded in creating American defeat in the past:

Things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. [Second section A.]

Al Qaeda’s only real choices were to either bypass Iraq, or to pursue a media strategy in alliance with the West’s anti-war, anti-Bush media. Here Zawahiri and Zarcawi were of one mind that that Iraq was the central battle for the heart of the Islamic world. Their religious convictions would not let them abandon Iraq:

I want to be the first to congratulate you for what God has blessed you with in terms of fighting battle in the heart of the Islamic world, which was formerly the field for major battles in Islam's history, and what is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era, and what will happen, according to what appeared in the Hadiths of the Messenger of God about the epic battles between Islam and atheism. [First section A]

And so it was settled. Al Qaeda’s would attack Iraqis, creating media events that the Western media could use to try to lose the war at home. It was understood that this strategy would turn the Iraqis against al Qaeda, losing the war on the ground, but maybe not before the Democrats and their media allies managed to lose the war in America. It would be a race: could the Democrat/ al Qaeda alliance create defeat in America before the American military would win the war in Iraq?

Not just a democracy, but a republic

Rumsfeld had to have been perfectly aware that al Qaeda’s strategy was to sacrifice their position on the ground in an attempt to win the war in the media. Not only had al Qaeda spelled it out for him, but from the beginning he was always watching both sides of the Jihadist population equation, trying to squeeze their birthrate as well as their death rate. In October 2003 he was asking:

Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

When al Qaeda answered his force protection strategy by attacking the Iraqi population, Rumsfeld obviously knew that this would turn the Iraqi people against al Qaeda, turning that population equation drastically in our favor. There was no reason at that point to upset this advantageous applecart by changing strategy. Just let it work, and not just because al Qaeda’s attacks on the Iraqi population promised to win the war on the ground for us. Equally important, it also handed us the one victory that we never could have won by military means alone: the battle to create in Iraq, not just a democracy, but a republic in the American sense (a system of liberty under law).

The great danger going into Iraq was not that we would lose the war, which was never a realistic possibility (so long as the Democrats did not actually succeed in losing the war at home). The real danger was losing the peace: that the Iraqi people, devoid of any post-Saddam identity beyond religion, would elect a Khomeinist government, handing the country democratically to the Islamofascists. In Iran, it took fifteen years for the population to turn en masse against the Islamofascists. We couldn't wait 15 years in Iraq. The democracy would already be usurped.

If the theocrats took democratic control of the government even once, Iraq would be lucky to ever have democratic elections again. Elect people who believe that democracy is an “evil principle,” (Zarqawi’s description) and they are not likely to adhere to it. But Rumsfeld’s force-protection strategy, and al Qaeda’s response to it, matured the Iraqi contempt for theocracy in a short couple of very long years.

The vast majority of Iraqis now hate the religious vision of the Islamofascists. They hate the contempt for democracy and they hate the religious intolerance. Iraqis are rising now as a united people, promising brotherhood with Iraqis of other faiths. Just as Sunnis are standing up to al Qaeda , so too are Shiites standing up to Iran and the Sadr army.

There is still religious persecution, but it is coming from outsiders. The one exception is in Mosul Basra, where the British left too soon. If we abandon Iraq, the dirtbags are still strong enough to intimidate, but they have already lost the battle for hearts and minds. Their thuggery will just make them more hated, until the democratic government is strong enough to purge these interlopers from Iraqi society.

As President Bush believed would happen, the Iraqis are forging their own brand of Islam, an Islam of democracy and religious liberty. It will transform the Islamic world, and it was all enabled by the Democrats’ declared intent to turn Iraq into “another Vietnam.” How could Al Qaeda say 'no,' with the Democrats offering full assistance? In the words of New York Senator Chuck Schumer:

There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam. The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm's way and come home.

As Blackfive points out with some ire, Democrat leaders must think the American people are pretty stupid, as if we don't know that wars are either won or lost and that you can't just "bring the troops home" without losing.

Such tissues of denial have never fooled al Qaeda, which has always been perfectly clear on their de facto alliance with anti-war Westerners. Having the media on their side was obviously a big lure for al Qaeda, but what really made the alliance work , and what made it irresistable to al Qaeda, was the particular media strategy that the Democrats decided to employ.

The Democrats find a force multiplier for their media strategy: the Iraq war is a “civil war”

While Zawahiri was opining about how to fine tune al Qaeda’s media strategy on the ground, the Democrats were working on how best to lose the war at home. In October 2005, the same month as Zawahiri’s letter, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein articulated what would become the centerpiece of Democratic efforts to abandon Iraq. She characterized the Iraq war as a civil war, insinuating the supposed Vietnam war lesson that it is always a mistake to interfere in a civil war:

We are in the middle of two factions, Shiite and Sunni, attempting to settle their differences by mostly violent means. …

I believe this is a matter for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to address through political negotiation. This battle cannot be won militarily.

America needs to change course, reassess its mission in light of this escalating insurgency, place more responsibility on Iraq for a negotiated settlement, and begin a structured drawdown of American forces.

These talking points--“the battle cannot be won militarily” so “its time to start pulling out”—were at the center of the Democrats’ push the next month for a “timetable for withdrawal.” This is where the Democrats began actually trying to pull the plug on our war effort and hand Iraq over to al Qaeda and Iran.

The “civil war” characterization of the war was a force multiplier for the al Qaeda/Democrat media war alliance. “Continuing violence” by itself did not by itself have a very powerful anti-war effect because it had tendencies not just to depress America’s fight spirit, but also to energize it. If the violence showed al Qaeda waging war on the Iraqi people, that would show the American people and the Iraqi people on the same side, which would make Americans want to protect Iraqis, while hinting at the reality on the ground: that more and more Iraqis were turning against al Qaeda.

For al Qaeda’s violence to really be effective in creating American disaffection for the war, the Democrats needed to frame the violence in a way that would not have these positive effects on America’s fighting spirit. This is what the “civil war” trope accomplished. No longer was the “continuing violence” seen as al Qaeda and Iran murdering Iraqis. Now it was spun as Iraqis murdering Iraqis, with no side that we could help without antagonizing the other.

Hence the “timetable for withdrawal.” If all we could do is make enemies, until we ourselves became nothing but a source of conflict, then we should get out. By taking on the mass murderers, we had supposedly made ourselves the problem. As Pennsylvania representative John Murtha put it:

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence.

The turning point for the war on the ground: al Qaeda and Iran play to the Democrats’ “civil war” trope

Where al Qaeda in late 2005 had been unsure whether killing Iraqi's was a good idea, the Democrat's "civil war" strategy tipped the balance. If the Democrats and their media allies were going to increase the effectiveness of mass murder by depicting it as the eruption of civil war, then by Allah, mass murder is what al Qaeda was going to deliver.

In February 2006, al Qaeda and Iran joined forces to trump up the biggest, fattest, phoniest civil war they could muster. Sunni al Qaeda blew up the Shiite Golden Dome mosque, and Iranian backed Shiite militias “retaliated” by launching dozens of attacks on Sunni civilians, with Iran actually funding both sides of this elaborate theater.

If these Saudi, Syrian and Iranian proxy warriors had been able to start a real civil war, it would indeed have made things difficult, but the Iraqis were having none of it. The Golden Dome attack was the birthday of the Anbar Revenge Brigades, announced to the world a scant two weeks later. Instead of retaliating against Iraqi Shiites, as al Qaeda and Iran had hoped, Iraqi Sunnis retaliated against al Qaeda.

Victory on the ground became at that point a certainty. The Iraqi Sunni hold-outs who had been fighting us began switching sides, and the harder al Qaeda fought it, the more thoroughly they would become hated in the new Iraq. But it wasn’t just the pace of coalition victory on the ground that was greatly accelerated by the “civil war” media strategy. Equally dramatic was the effect on the negative fighting spirit of the American people.

A March 2006 poll by the Washington Post and ABC News found that a full 80% of Americans saw Iraq falling into civil war, and they were responding just as the defeatists wanted:

In the face of continuing violence, half -- 52 percent -- of those surveyed said the United States should begin withdrawing forces.

Al Qaeda and Iran poured it on through all of 2006, blowing up Iraqis like crazy, until they had the Iraqi people almost 100% against them. But the Western media did not have any trouble spinning this violence as civil war. Even when it was perfectly clear that they were being played, the media just turned a blind eye.

Mudville nails The New York Times

One particularly glaring sequence was documented by milblogger Greyhawk at the Mudville Gazette. The New York Times’ front page headline for March 27, 2006 read: “30 Beheaded Bodies Found; Iraqi Death Squads Blamed”:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 26 — The bodies of 30 beheaded men were found on a main highway near Baquba this evening, providing more evidence that the death squads in Iraq are becoming out of control.

Two days later, Major General Thurman in Iraq exposed the story as a hoax. The Times buried its retracted headline in a paragraph seventeen, where it was joined with fresh claims of sectarian massacre:

The police in western Baghdad discovered 14 bodies on Tuesday, all killed execution-style with gunshots to the head, apparently the latest victims of sectarian bloodletting. On Monday, Iraqi forces found 18 bodies near Baquba with similar wounds. Earlier reports of 30 beheaded bodies found in that area were wrong, the Interior Ministry official said.

“Apparently the victims of sectarian bloodletting,” but not actually the victims of sectarian bloodletting. On April 2nd Stars and Stripes reported that the 18 victims near Baquba had been murdered by al Qaeda terrorists dressed up to look like Iraqi military. Al Qaeda was trying to make it look like the country, and the Iraqi military, were descending into “sectarian bloodletting”

When the Times learned how it was being used by al Qaeda, it should have issued a front page apology and promised not to be duped again. Instead, the Times just kept on reporting each al Qaeda ploy with the same fresh gullibility. It was a game of footsie between them, striving on both sides for American defeat.

Another TET Offensive

By the end of 2006, 86% of Americans had swallowed the “civil war” hoax hook line and sinker. In the media sphere, the Democrat/ al Qaeda alliance had proved a total success. How total? It won them the 2006 mid-term elections, with control of both houses of Congress. That’s the brass ring. They gained the control over government necessary to effect the unilateral surrender they had been promising. The only thing left was to actually surrender.

Total destruction for al Qaeda on the ground was successfully turned into a media victory for al Qaeda. It was a carbon copy of the 1968 TET Offensive in Vietnam, as Arnaud de Borchgrave had been warning about since 2004. The Communists in South Vietnam threw everything they had at the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries, and been utterly destroyed, never again to threaten as a fighting force. But Walter Cronkite reported the ferocity of the attack as a measure of Communist strength and declared the war unwinnable. LBJ surrendered to Walter Cronkite, announcing a couple of weeks later that he would not seek re-election, and the Democrats succeeded in losing the war at home, even after it was already won on the ground. (Cronkite is even bidding to play the same role again today.)

But surrender efforts take time, just as victory on the ground does. It turned out that, while the Democratic Party leadership has been united on a policy of surrender to al Qaeda, not all Democrats are on board. A handful of holdouts have allowed time for al Qaeda’s defeat on the ground to become a fait accompli, which is making more Democrats reluctant to surrender to al Qaeda. Thus the time of greatest danger should be past, even though the Democrat surrender efforts continue unabated. There have been plenty of attempts (forty so far this year), and Harry Reid is still spewing the “un-winnable civil war” mantra:

(Al Qaeda, in the meantime, informs us that all but 200 of their fighters in Iraq are dead.)

The media has also continued to pretend that the al Qaeda and Iranian proxy war is a civil war. In July of this year, the captured leader of al Qaeda in Iraq admitted that the organization went to great lengths to pretend that it was an Iraqi organization, even pretending to follow a fictitious figurehead with an Iraqi name:

In his words, the Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al Qaeda in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Reuters headline? “Senior Qaeda figure in Iraq a myth: U.S. military.” Or in the words of Don Surber: Bass-ack-wards. Reuters tried to make it look to the casual reader that al Qaeda was the myth, when the actual myth was that the violence in Iraq is home grown.

This has been par for the course for four years. The media knows as well as al Qaeda that this is a race, and it looks now that the race has been won by our military, thanks to the switch to a more aggressive finishing strategy orchestrated by General Petraeus. What has allowed the “surge” strategy to succeed so spectacularly is the Iraqi people’s almost unanimous hatred for al Qaeda, created by the Democrat/ al Qaeda media strategy of blowing up Iraqis. This turn against al Qaeda was fully formed during Rumsfeld’s tenure. To make use of that hatred, all Petraeus had to do was switch from force protection to population protection. Protected from retaliation, Iraqis expressed their hatred of al Qaeda by pointing to the bad guys.

Should we have used the Petraeus strategy from the outset?

That’s a little like seeing Ali come off the ropes in the 8th round to kayo Foreman and thinking: “hey, he should have done that in round one.” Petraeus’ “clear, hold and build” strategy might have worked earlier, but it also might have altered al Qaeda’s strategy. If our troops had been more exposed, al Qaeda might have concentrated more on military targets and less on the Iraqi population, which was the key decision that determined everything. Induce al Qaeda to make a different decision, and who knows how things might have turned out?

In the counterinsurgency manual that he co-authored, Petraeus describes the logic of the population protection strategy:

Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be

1-149. Ultimate success in COIN is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force. If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents. Aggressive saturation patrolling, ambushes, and listening post operations must be conducted, risk shared with the populace, and contact maintained. . . . These practices ensure access to the intelligence needed to drive operations. Following them reinforces the connections with the populace that help establish real legitimacy.From “Counterinsurgency/FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5” [Quote selection Michael Yon.)

But this supposes that the population is intimidated by the counterinsurgency, instead of sympathetic to it. Colonel David Kilcullen, an Australian advisor to General Petraeus, explains the surge strategy this way:

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation.

The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain.

But winning the cooperation of an intimidated population and winning the cooperation of a hostile population are very different things, and at the start of the Iraq war, the Sunni minority was broadly hostile. Saddam Hussein had established them as a ruling class over the majority Shiites. We had kicked them out of that privileged position and were sticking them with minority status in system of government by majority rule. Anything they could do to keep us from succeeding, they were sympathetic to.

Going in, one might well have given the population protection strategy a better chance of working than the force protection strategy. (Ditto for McCain's consistent calls for more troops, favoring big footprint over small footprint, without specifying a preference for either force protection or population protection.)

But the way al Qaeda and Iran responded to our small-footprint/ force protection strategy--by blowing up Iraqi civilians to create a phony “civil war” for the Western media--made the force protection strategy a winner. It turned the Sunni population against al Qaeda, turning them from hostile to intimidated: just the conditions that Petraeus strategy was formulated to succeed in.

If we had a do over, it would be crazy to alter this sequence. It is purely speculative whether the Petraeus strategy could work on a hostile population. The Rumsfeld strategy DID work.

It was perfectly clear what was happening

Only in hindsight do we know that the force protection strategy would elicit such a reckless gamble from al Qaeda: getting them the bet their reputation throughout the entire Muslim world on the ability of their Democrat allies to lose the war at home. What does not require hindsight—what was perfectly obvious at the time—was that al Qaeda’s decision to attack the Iraqi population was going to lose them the war on the ground.

By attacking the Iraqi people they [the terrorists] are winning for the United States the one battle we could not otherwise win by force of arms: the battle for the direction that the Iraqi and Afghan democracies will take. We cannot force the electorates of these countries to favor religious liberty, yet the terrorists are doing more than we could ever hope to give intolerance a very very bad name. This is how Al Qaeda chooses to spend its limited pool of Jihadists? They are dying by the tens and hundreds to serve OUR purposes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Judy Woodruff's] optimism offers an explanation. She is a little frustrated because Katrina is hampering the ability of her and her colleagues to attack the war effort, but it doesn't keep down her pluck:

...we were just sitting here saying, if it hadn't been for Katrina, the numbers on--the deaths in Iraq would have been all in the headlines the last week.

This when al Qaeda by its own admission was being systematically destroyed by the U.S. military. Go Judy!

Bin Laden's September 7th 2007 video from the cave expressed his bitter disappointment in the failure of the Democrats to follow through on defeat:

People of America: ... after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning.

Like a good ally, he makes excuses for the Democrats' failure, straight from the American left's own talking points:

... since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment, and there isn't any, in the Democrats' failure to stop the war.

The consequences of this failed Democrat/ al-Qaeda alliance is a much more positive outcome than we could otherwise have hoped for. If al Qaeda had just recognized our military superiority and chosen not to commit its resources in Iraq, they a) would still be alive to fight elsewhere, and b) would still be able to proclaim themselves as defenders of Islam. Instead they gambled everything on their media strategy, committing atrocities that the Democrats could use to win surrender for them. Now their name is dirt, and their bodies are dirt.

Equal rights in the Islamic world?

The result is the prospect of a religiously tolerant Iraq, truly something new under the sun in the Islamic world. Iraq now has a chance to become a modern republic, protecting equal liberty under law. Its constitution asserts both human rights and Islamic identity. The great question was which would give when there was a conflict between traditional Islamic suppression of religious minorities and equal rights.

Thanks to the al Qaeda/Democrat media strategy, the Iraqi people now hate the religious intolerance of al Qaeda and Iran with a white hot passion, giving them the best possible chance to become the first modern Republic in the Islamic world (a republic that chooses to reject theocracy, unlike Turkey, which has its theocratic tendencies denied by un-democratic means). Figure ten years before they start to completely outstrip the rest of the Islamic world economically, making them a model for other Muslim countries to follow.

Credit Donald Rumsfelds’ wartime leadership, the Democrat/ al Qaeda alliance that fell into his lap, President Bush’s backbone, and most of all, the blood sweat and tears of our military families who actually pulled it all off.

He has also left a revealing paper trail. Shortly after 9/11, Indiana University School of Law sponsored a forum on the likely legal fallout from the attacks: consequences for immigration law, civil rights, etcetera. As the university’s resident expert on Islamic (sharia) law, Jaques was invited to say something about our looming engagement with the Islamic world and their systems of law.

He chose to write a prescriptive article, urging the United States to frame its response in conformity with traditional sharia requirements:

In formulating an American response to the acts of terror, it is necessary to define them according to the provisions of Islamic law.

Whitewashing sharia

Jaques makes the basic arguments for submission that any anti-war multiculturalist might make. He offers an appeasement pitch:

If the United States wishes to approach the fight against terrorism to limit future revivalist terror groups from forming and attacking American citizens and interests, it will be necessary to craft a response that conforms to the realities of Islamic law.

And he offers a when-in-Rome pitch:

Muslim religious leaders think of the world in legal terms and will react to U.S. policies according to how these policies conflict or adhere to Islamic legal principles.

Of course we should avoid gratuitous offense, when in Rome (just as we should practice it as a pastime at home). But should we really submit to sharia law?

Nowhere does Jaques even acknowledge that world-wide submission to sharia law is the ultimate goal of the 9/11 terrorists. That is a pretty glaring omission for someone who is advocating adherence to sharia law, but Jaques does more than just elide the point. He actively misleads, going to great lengths to pretend that the terrorists reject the whole idea of sharia law:

[R]evivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are similar to traditional legal norms. Only the violent fringe—approximately 1 percent to 2 percent of Muslims worldwide—would disparage any discussion of Islamic law as being reflective of the kinds of non-Islamic ideas that they claim have contaminated Islam since the very first centuries of Islamic history.

Talk about a whitewash! To paint sharia as benign, Jaques pretends that the "violent fringe" is opposed to it, and this is no offhand comment. The whole first third of Jaques’ discussion is spent setting up this punch line.

Qutb did you say?

Jaques begins by describing how Islamic jurisprudence has historically proceeded by working out consensus views of the meaning of "texts of revelation": the Koran and the sunnah (Muhammad's biography). He then discusses the trend toward "revivalism," starting in the 14th century, which sought to purify Islamic jurisprudence by purging all influences other than Koran and biography.

The modern phase of this revivalism is the work of Wahhab and Qtub, the sources of today's bin Ladenist doctrines of maximally aggressive conquest. Wahhab dismissed the requirement for consensus, insisting that anyone can read the Koran for themselves, and Qtub carried this innovation in a particularly violent direction:

Qutb advocated a radicalized form of Wahhabi extremism as the only means of driving foreign (meaning U.S. and Israeli) influences out of the Islamic world. His writings have become the basic texts of contemporary violent fringe movements around the Islamic world.

Jaques identifies the “violent fringe” with Qutb while claiming that the violent fringe “disparage[s] any discussion of Islamic law.” But Qutb did not shun sharia law. Just the opposite. He declared that any Muslim ruler who failed to impose sharia should be killed as an apostate.

Sayyid Qutb had pointed the way by declaring that a leader who does not impose Sharia on the country must be an apostate. There is a well known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity, or for turning away from Islam. The pious Anwar Sadat was the first modern victim of the reverse logic of takfir.

Jaques takes the 20th century’s foremost advocate for imposing sharia by violent means across the entire globe and suggests that he and his followers "would disparage any discussion of Islamic law."

Whitewashing Wahhabism

Pretending that the violent fringe spurns sharia allows Jaques to whitewash, not just sharia, but also the mainstream revivalist movements that, as Jaques acknowledges, fully embrace sharia:

... revivalist movements around the Islamic world are articulating new and exciting systems of legal interpretation that, in real terms, are similar to traditional legal norms.

The mainstream of revivalism is Saudi Wahhabism, the state sponsored doctrine of violent aggressive conquest whose "fringe" elements attacked us on 9/11. As Jaques notes, these revivalists are thoroughly traditional in their interpretations of sharia law. All of them look backwards to the purity of 7th century Islam. Not much “new” there, however “exciting” to a person of Jaques’ evident sympathies.

Doctrinally, there is no gap between the "violent fringe" of bin Ladenists and the larger Wahhabi sect that spawned them. At most there are questions about whether bin Laden has been a good general, whose strategies effectively serve the Wahhabi goal of world domination. Mainstream Wahhabism completely embraces all of bin Laden’s objectives.

Honest about one thing: how sharia limits infidel responses

When he turns to the question of how we could frame a military response that is consistent with sharia law, Jaques takes the subject seriously, and is commendably forthright, acknowledging sharia as the law of Islamic conquest:

The laws of war that developed in the earliest periods divide the world into two halves, dar al-Islam, or the "land of submission" and dar al-harb, the "land of war." Dar al-Islam refers to any territory that is under the control of Muslims and thus forms an Islamic commonwealth. Legal texts imply that the term is meant to denote a political designation of submission to Muslim political authority. … All areas outside of Muslim political authority are considered to be in a potential state of war with the Muslim state. All relations between the areas of submission and the areas of war are regulated by the concept of jihad … an obligatory "struggle" against non-believers who are not already under Muslim rule.

Any cessation in hostilities is purely strategic, until Muslims can get back to a position of strength from which to continue to fight:

The law outlines, in most cases, rules for the cessation of struggle (hudnah) when it is deemed by the Imam or his surrogates that it is to the advantage of the Muslims to do so, or out of a need due to Muslim weakness. In cases where Muslims simply seek some advantage in the cessation of hostilities, hudnah is limited to a period of four months. If the cessation of hostilities is due to Muslim weakness, hudnah can last for a period of up to 10 years.

Jaques also acknowledges that under Islamic law, infidels have no legal rights to fight back against Muslims at all:

…reaction by the United States becomes problematic since the rebels are still defined as Muslim and the law expressly forbids non-Muslims from attacking Muslims in a Muslim land.

Yes, well, that is the problem with conforming to the law of Islamic supremacism. It’s called "surrender."

Takfir squared, or Qutbed

So we must submit to Islamic law, says Jaques, yet according to Islamic law, we are not allowed to fight back. What to do? What to do?

Jaques, expert in the nuances of Islamic law, offers us a way out. We can embrace Qutb’s innovation and declare the bin Ladenists apostates! (The strategy of takfir.) Then we would be allowed to kill them. But of course we have to get Muslim jurists to okay this first:

American responses to the attacks will be greatly assisted if Muslim jurists are willing to define the attacks as riddah (apostasy) and not as bughat (rebellion), or simple homicide (qatl). In the latter two categories, the perpetrators remain Muslim and any effort by non-Muslims to punish them will expressly violate provisions in Islamic law that prevents non-Muslims from killing Muslims. Only apostates may be killed by non-Muslims, and in some interpretations, Muslims may ask non-Muslims for assistance in bringing apostates to justice.

The only way Jaques is able to make this Qutbian strategy seem like a real possibility is through his earlier deception, pretending that the "violent fringe" is hostile to sharia law. Since there is not actually any doctrinal divide between the bin Ladenists and the traditional Islam, there is no way for traditional jurists to declare them apostates.

Jaques himself makes clear that the complaint about bin Laden from the point of view of traditional Islam is that he acted without consensus, and that he seems to be a bad general, engaging in acts that weaken rather than strengthen the Muslim position:

Defining the acts as contraventions of ijma would not hinge just on the enormity of the acts (simple murder contravenes ijma but is not defined as apostasy), but also on the idea that they endanger the Muslim community because of what they suggest about structures of legal authority. Encouraging others to commit suicide, claiming the right to declare jihad, to kill thousands (including many Muslims) and destroy billions of dollars of property without proper consent, and to risk the lives of Muslims due to Western military and economic retaliations challenges the authority of the community of jurists and of every principle of law that, by consensus, seeks to promote the welfare of the Muslim community.

But if bin Laden is just a bad general, acting without proper authority, how exactly is he supposed to be declared an apostate? Under sharia, the terror attacks might at most be viewed as rebellion (for which infidels have no recourse), but as Jaques notes, the demise of the caliphate makes it impossible even to establish bin Laden as a rebel. Who is he rebelling against?

Defining the acts as bughat [rebellion] is complicated by the fact that there is no universally recognized Muslim leader in any area of the Muslim world and has not been for more than 700 years. Many jurists argue that since this is the case, rules for bughat are not applicable today.

The bin Ladenists are trying to rectify this lack of a recognized Muslim leader by establishing a new caliphate. That hardly makes them apostates.

First Jaques pretends that the terrorists are hostile to sharia law. Then he pretends that sharia law is hostile to the terrorists. All the while neglecting to mention that the terrorists' explicit goal is world submission to sharia law. That is quite a concatenation of strategic deception (taqiyya).

Jaques was just as deceptive in his advice to the Memorial Project

That giant Mecca-oriented crescent that forms the centerpiece of the Flight 93 Memorial? Jaques admits that it is similar to the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built, but so what:

...just because something is 'similar to' something else does not make it the 'same'.

The half-mile wide crescent is much too big, says Jaques, to be recognized as the central feature of a mosque. After all, that would make it the world's biggest mosque by a factor of a hundred! What could be sillier? But Taqiyya very much for asking.

Jaques does not name his own religious beliefs, but it seems pretty clear that he must be a Muslim, and probably of the revivalist stripe (which he finds so “new and exciting”). Will he deny it, as Islam allows (Koran, verse 16:106)? Feel free to ask. Please note any response in the comments.

UPDATE: not a "Clintonian" lie

Just an additional note on Jaques' statement that the “violent fringe”:

would disparage any discussion of Islamic law as being reflective of the kinds of non-Islamic ideas that they claim have contaminated Islam since the very first centuries of Islamic history.

Could Jaques possibly have been trying to say that any discussion of Islamic law is impossible with these people in the sense that they won’t brook any disagreement?

That would be a correct characterization of the “violent fringe.” They do indeed have a policy of killing anyone who disagrees with them. This interpretation of Jaques’ meaning would turn his deception into what one might call “a Clintonian lie.” His sentence clearly intends to mislead the reader, creating the impression that the “violent fringe” is hostile to Islamic law, yet Jaques would be holding on in his mind to the opposite meaning: that the violent ones are so fiercely attached to Islamic law that they reject any debate about it, allowing him to satisfy his conscience in a perverse way with the consolation that in some technical sense he is telling the truth.

But this “Clintonian” interpretation does not stand up to scrutiny, because Jaques has already been clear that the driving force behind the “revivalist” movement has always been their insistence that they are allowed to discuss Islamic law for themselves and come to their own logical conclusions about the meaning of Koran and Sunnah. Jaques traces this development first through the 14th century jurist Ibn Ibn Taymiyah, who:

… argued that for law to continue to be relevant to the needs of the Muslim community, jurists would have to exercise greater levels of independent reasoning and cast off those areas of law that were based on the blind adherence to the authority of previous generations of jurists.

Then he traces it through the 18th century founder of Saudi Wahhabism, Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab who called for:

… the elevation of the individual Muslim as the sole interpreter of the texts of revelation: All that was necessary to interpret the will of God was individual piety and the ability to read the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet in their original Arabic.

And this is indeed what we see with Wahhabism in general and the “violent fringe” in particular: that as individuals they argue industriously, on the basis of Koran and Sunnah, that their ideology of violent aggressive conquest is the true Islam. Not only do they discuss it, but there is no way to shut them up (except by killing them).

Since Jaques himself has already acknowledged this gabby character of the revivalists, his claim that the “violent fringe” rejects “discussion of Islamic law” can only be counted a flat lie, presumably intended to have its obvious effect: whitewashing sharia law by pretending that the terrorists reject sharia law, as is necessary for the case Jaques is making: that the U.S. response to 9/11 should conform to sharia law.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

TBogg deleted evidence of cover up at the Flight 93 Memorial

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted.

INTERJECTION UPDATE: TBogg has posted an excuse for the deleted Flight 93 document, but the Wayback Machine says that he is not being honest. END INTERJECTION UPDATE.

In January 2006, I baited the TBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg's comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than the usual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of my January 2006 report to the Memorial Project.

I would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.)

The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial is geometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. "[J]ust because something is 'similar to' something else, does not make it the 'same'.")

Dr. Kevin Jaques

Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service's fraudlent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr. Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana.

One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over head, but from the ground? Pshaw.

It’s too big to recognize!

TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread

For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques' comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques' comment deleted.

A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls "the infamous comment thread" can be found in Chapter Eight of my Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask?

Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled Jaques' comment out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via its original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important.

What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy? (Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior.

Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment?

It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg's blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth.

Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when I released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of my book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed me to make my then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.)

The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell me who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but I warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, I urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship.

This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed?

That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission.

It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what I am claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques' TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such a plot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up?

If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it.

The fraudulent internal investigation

For more of Kevin Jaques' dishonest excuse-making, see last week's blogburst on the bogus internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.)

But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Memorial Project's sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.

UPDATE

TBogg has posted a reply. He says that he lost all his comment threads when he changed comment systems:

Sometime following that event, after I was done picking up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and the assorted discarded underwear, I switched from Blogspot comments to Haloscan. In the process, all of the previous comment threads were lost...

That prompted me to do some looking on Wayback Machine for what was deleted when (thanks to the first commenter for reminding me).

Turns out that the last Wayback copy of his Lunacy Abounds post that still has the comment thread (October 28, 2006), ALREADY has the Jaques comment deleted. That is, the Jaques comment was deleted before TBogg made the comment system change-over.

That looks bad, but with some further searching, I found that an innocent explanation is still possible. The Wayback copy from July 5th 2006 has the Jaques comment intact. Then on August 21st the whole comment thread is down. Then in October it is back up, without the Jaques comment at the end.

It is possible (and plenty plausible) that while TBogg was experimenting with changing over his comment system in August 2006, he used a backup from early March 2006 (before Jaques left his comment), and that is why the October 2006 thread and the currently posted thread lack the Jaques comment.

If this is what happened, well, it’s a good thing there is a Wayback Machine. But TBogg himself has not yet answered the question. He suggests the innocent explanation about the comment system switch-over, while adding:

So, yes. I have been busted. I've been getting more payoffs than Bill Bennett with a roll of nickels at Circus Circus. Between George Soros and Osama bin Laden I've received so many Miatas, that some of them are still sitting around in the blister packs.

Can we have a simple yes or no? Did TBogg intentionally take down the Jaques comment or didn’t he? And if he did, did he do it on his own or was he asked, and by whom?

Why do I have to ask this twice?

UPDATE II: Looks like TBogg is duping his readers

Upon further investigation, it is NOT plausible that the Jaques comment got chopped off by TBogg restoring his comment thread with an old back-up copy. It is not even possible. On all the Wayback Machine snapshots linked above, all of the comments are hosted by Blogger, not Holoscan, and Blogger does not have back-up and restore functions.

I was just looking into what us Blogger bloggers can do with comments, and we can only do three things. 1. We can open and close commenting. 2. We can hide or show comments. 3.) We can delete individual comments. People who leave comments also have the power to remove their own comments, so long as they were logged into blogger accounts when they left the comments.

Kevin Jaques posted his comment anonymously, so the only way it could have gotten deleted is if TBogg deleted it.

I also noticed that on the day when the TBogg comment thread shows up on Wayback as turned off (August 21, 2006) it is the only post of his that has the comments turned off. That obviously did not have anything to do with TBogg changing over from Blogger comments to Haloscan comments.

When TBogg temporarily turned the comment thread back on again (by October 28th, 2006) the Jaques comment is missing from the end of the thread. All still through the Blogger comment system. No Haloscan changeover had anything to do with any of this. (Did he ever actually change over. None of Wayback's snapshots say so, but they only have one link for 2007, and that won't open.)

TBoggs deception here is very Clintonesque. He does not actually lie to his readers. He never denies that he deleted the comment. Instead, he makes some noise about doing the comment system changeover, without ever claiming that the changeover was responsible for the disappearance of the Flight 93 evidence. Then he adds his: “I have been busted” statement, throwing in nonsense about taking money from George Soros so that no one would take his admission seriously.

Hey TBogglings. Looks like your mentor meant it when he said he was busted. Maybe he can come up with an innocuous explanation, but I sure don’t see how.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

Want to join our blogbursts and be on the blogburst blogroll? Email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog's url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.